iPod vs. Vista....Fight!

[Russell Nash]

thank you to everyone who brought up smart playlists.  I had never used these before, but now I have seven set up. 

I love'em, too. I can't remember how i stumbled onto it, but i think i use more Smart Lists now than regular lists.

I've now moved up to "Super Smartlists" as Wherethewild called them.  That's where you set up a bunch of sub-lists and then have another list that refines the choices made in the sub-lists. 

Things just get better and better.  With my new machine I moved from USB1 to USB2.  My iPod now syncs in under a minute, even when it's around 100MB transfer.  Also with the latest update to my iPod it now "auto-ejects" after the transfer.  It still is in my iTunes, in case I want to make any more changes, but I can disconnect at any time after it syncs without hitting eject in iTunes and waiting.

[Planish]

Well, I don't know about how often Apple products fail, ...

I and my family members have had something like ten or twelve different Macs, starting with a Mac Plus (ca. 1986), and the only hardware failures I've seen were a diode in the power supply on the Mac Plus, and about a week ago the L2 cache failed on a 2001 G4 "Quicksilver" tower.
Oh yeah - I broke a two keycaps off of a keyboard when I dropped it on the floor, and I finally retired a 15" Apple monitor last year that I had been using since like the mid-'90s. It was getting somewhat dim and giving a bluish caste in places.

I still have the Mac Plus, upgraded with 4MB RAM, a third-party Motorola 68030 25 MHz processor, and an external 10 MB SCSI ZFP hard drive. It still works, along with the original mouse and keyboard.

[Russell Nash]

Steve Jobs is lying. Or he disagrees with the ITMS management team, and has surprisingly little input. Several indie labels wanted to unencrypted downloads available on iTunes, and their response was "sorry, but we DRM everything. If you don't want that, go elsewhere." And then the mean old record companies let Amazon sell unencrypted MP3's, and they didn't even put up much of a fight over it! Shortly after that, ITMS started offering DRM-free downloads, having apparently won some major coup against the record labels.

Told you so

DRM free at iTunes

[Raving_Lunatic]

An important thing to remember about iTunes + (DRM free version) is that it's also higher sound quality (256kbps) which to people who listen to a whole heap of music like me- very important. However it's only available on some albums (the popular ones mainly).

[Russell Nash]

I think all MP3 sucks.  I only use it when I'm not really listening.  For now I'm still a CD man.  If I wasn't so lazy, I'd probably be a vinyl guy.

[Raving_Lunatic]

I have sennheisers but thats the peak of my audiophilia. It's all because of Radiohead.

[Bdoomed]

talk about threadomancy

[Darwinist]

I think all MP3 sucks.  I only use it when I'm not really listening.  For now I'm still a CD man.  If I wasn't so lazy, I'd probably be a vinyl guy.

May I ask why you prefer vinyl?  I hear that frequently from music fans.  I still have many of my vinyl records but prefer CD's.  I always had trouble keeping my vinyl scratch free during the college years, they were often handled by drunk folks. 

[Russell Nash]

I think all MP3 sucks.  I only use it when I'm not really listening.  For now I'm still a CD man.  If I wasn't so lazy, I'd probably be a vinyl guy.

May I ask why you prefer vinyl?  I hear that frequently from music fans.  I still have many of my vinyl records but prefer CD's.  I always had trouble keeping my vinyl scratch free during the college years, they were often handled by drunk folks. 

That was the problem with vinyl and part of the reason why I stick with CDs.  Vinyl actually has a wider acoustical range than CDs.  It's very subtle and you need a really great recording to hear the difference.  You end up with more of a feeling than something you can point at.

[Raving_Lunatic]

A fair amount of the stuff I listen to is crappy bootlegs though, and frankly it makes little difference whether a recording is 128, 256 or FLAC if it was only taken by a guy with mikes up his jumper.

[stePH]

A fair amount of the stuff I listen to is crappy bootlegs though, and frankly it makes little difference whether a recording is 128, 256 or FLAC if it was only taken by a guy with mikes up his jumper.

It can make the difference between a bad recording and an unlistenable one.  Take a recording with poor sound quality, degrade it further with a sub-128-bitrate* compression, and it's likely to go into "why bother" territory.  I'd want those encoded at as high a quality as possible -- FLAC would be ideal.

* music encoded to MP3 at 128 sounds acceptable to my non-audiophile ears, but anything less makes it sound like it's coming over a crappy FM station.

[Raving_Lunatic]

I agree that anything less than 128kbps sounds awful regardless of the recording quality, but I have live versions of the same song in 128 and FLAC and it makes no difference to the quality of the track. With studio recordings, it does.